Page 113 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

STRUCTURALISM

with the high modernist canon to accord any serious attention to a
contemporary culture that has acquired an increasingly postmodern
complexion: Barthes’s writerly texts are modernist rather than
postmodernist in character; and insofar as Foucault’s archaeology is
able to envisage a “post-modern” episteme, it is that inaugurated by
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high structuralism itself. As Alex Callinicos notes with perverse
approval, it is not at all clear that the major post-structuralist thinkers
do endorse the idea of the postmodern. That this is indeed so is part
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of the failure of post-structuralism, however. Andreas Huyssen has
suggestively argued that “rather than offering a theory of postmodernity
and developing an analysis of contemporary culture, French theory
provides us primarily with an archaeology of modernity, a theory of
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modernism at the stage of its exhaustion”. But if post-structuralism
is thus in no sense a theory of postmodernity, there is another interesting
sense in which, as Huyssen also recognizes, it is nonetheless itself an
important instance of postmodernism: “the gesture of poststructuralism,
to the extent that it abandons all pretense to a critique that would go
beyond language games…seems to seal the fate of the modernist project
which…always upheld a vision of a redemption of modern life through
culture. That such visions are no longer possible to sustain may be at
the heart of the postmodern condition”. 125
There can be little doubt that the transition from structuralism to
post-structuralism has entailed a certain retreat both from “macro-
politics” of the kind once familiar both to the left and to the right,
and from the historical “grand narratives” which often accompanied
such politics. Indeed, the attempt to undermine the epistemological
and political status of historical knowledge has been characteristic of
the entire post-structuralist enterprise. In this respect, post-structuralism
remains deeply complicit in what Fredric Jameson terms the more
generally postmodernist sensibility of a “society bereft of all
historicity”. Structuralism was itself a profoundly anti-historicist
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doctrine; post-structuralism further radicalized this anti-historicism
by deconstructing even the notion of structure itself. In its place we
find: first, a rejection of the truth both of science and of theory, in
favour of the infinitely plural pleasures of a textuality possessed of no
determinate relation either to the linguistic signified or to any extra-
linguistic referent; and second, a stress on the radical contemporaneity
and radical indeterminacy, in short the radical textuality, of our current
constructions of the past.

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